Several types of memory devices, such as Flash memories, use arrays of analog memory cells for storing data. Each analog memory cell stores a quantity of an analog value, also referred to as a storage value, such as an electrical charge or voltage. The storage value represents the information stored in the cell. In Flash memories, for example, each analog memory cell holds a certain amount of electrical charge. The range of possible analog values is typically divided into regions, each region corresponding to one or more data bit values. Data is written to an analog memory cell by writing a nominal analog value that corresponds to the desired bit or bits.
Some memory devices, which are commonly referred to as Single-Level Cell (SLC) devices, store a single bit of information in each memory cell, i.e., each memory cell can be programmed to assume two possible memory states. Higher-density devices, often referred to as Multi-Level Cell (MLC) devices, store two or more bits per memory cell, i.e., can be programmed to assume more than two possible memory states.
Flash memory devices are described, for example, by Bez et al., in “Introduction to Flash Memory,” Proceedings of the IEEE, volume 91, number 4, April, 2003, pages 489-502, which is incorporated herein by reference. Multi-level Flash cells and devices are described, for example, by Eitan et al., in “Multilevel Flash Cells and their Trade-Offs,” Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), New York, N.Y., pages 169-172, which is incorporated herein by reference. The paper compares several kinds of multilevel Flash cells, such as common ground, DINOR, AND, NOR and NAND cells.
Eitan et al., describe another type of analog memory cell called Nitride Read Only Memory (NROM) in “Can NROM, a 2-bit, Trapping Storage NVM Cell, Give a Real Challenge to Floating Gate Cells?” Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials (SSDM), Tokyo, Japan, Sep. 21-24, 1999, pages 522-524, which is incorporated herein by reference. NROM cells are also described by Maayan et al., in “A 512 Mb NROM Flash Data Storage Memory with 8 MB/s Data Rate”, Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2002), San Francisco, Calif., Feb. 3-7, 2002, pages 100-101, which is incorporated herein by reference. Other exemplary types of analog memory cells are Floating Gate (FG) cells, Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) cells, magnetic RAM (MRAM) cells, Charge Trap Flash (CTF) and phase change RAM (PRAM, also referred to as Phase Change Memory-PCM) cells. FRAM, MRAM and PRAM cells are described, for example, by Kim and Koh in “Future Memory Technology including Emerging New Memories,” Proceedings of the 24.sup.th International Conference on Microelectronics (MIEL), Nis, Serbia and Montenegro, May 16-19, 2004, volume 1, pages 377-384, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Analog memory cells are often programmed using an iterative programming process that is commonly known as Program and verify (P&V). In a typical P&V process, a sequence of programming pulses is applied to a group of memory cells. The level of the programming pulses increases incrementally from pulse to pulse. The analog values programmed in the cells are read (“verified”) after each pulse, and the iterations continue until the desired levels are reached.
Some programming processes vary the parameters of the P&V process during programming. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,002,843, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a non-volatile memory device that is programmed by first performing a coarse programming process and subsequently performing a fine programming process. The coarse/fine programming methodology is enhanced by using an efficient verification scheme that allows some non-volatile memory cells to be verified for the coarse programming process while other non-volatile memory cells are verified for the fine programming process.
As another example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,054,193, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes write operations that simultaneously program multiple memory cells on the same word line in a Multi Bit Per Cell (MBPC) Flash memory. The write operations employ word line voltage variation, programming pulse width variation and data-dependent bit line and/or source line biasing to achieve uniform programming accuracy across a range of target threshold voltages.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,349,263, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes nonvolatile memory devices, which support P&V operations that improve the threshold voltage distribution within programmed memory cells. The improvement is achieved by reducing a magnitude of the programming voltage steps and increasing a duration of the verify operations once at least one of the plurality of memory cells undergoing programming has been verified as a “passed” memory cell.